A critical review of local and world news. This blog originally commented on the Moncton Times and Transcript but has enlarged its scope.

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Jan. 7: How time flies when you're having fun.

It is now 2 p.m.,
and my breakfast copy of the Moncton Times and Transcript has yet to
arrive. However, there is enough news around so we can get along
without it.

We'll start with an
issue the news media rarely mention. Israel as a Jewish state. I
dislike the idea of that because the implication is that Jews are not
only a nation, but a race. In fact, there is no such thing as a race.
And the term is inevitably used as Hitler used it – to make it
official that a certain people are intellectually and morally
superior to others. In fact, all us white folks in the west –
Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Canada, U.S. have used the word 'race'
with that meaning. (You have not met really obnoxious arrogance and
racism until you meet officials from those countries in places like
China. In Hong Kong, I taught reporters, both Chinese and British who
worked for The South China Morning Post. The Brits got paid more than
the Chinese for the same job – though I found the Chinese to be
better students. And it was clear the Brits saw themselves as a
superior lot.)

Judaism is a
religion. Zionism is the belief that Jews have the right to take over
a country on the very flimsy basis of a belief it is a land God gave
to them. There's a lot wrong with that.

In the first place,
the only people on earth who live in their original homeland are
Africans. (I thought my original homelands were Scotland and France –
and Canada. In fact, DNA shows that I'm mostly Irish and Spanish with
a hint of western Asia barbarian.)

If Canada and the
U.S. seriously believed in the concept of homeland, we would go back
to where we came from, and leave it to our aboriginal people.

As well, the Jews of
the middle east are a different people from most of the Jews of
Europe, Canada and the U.S. They don't have the slightly olive skin
of the Sephardic Jews who lived in Israel. Indeed, they look quite
European. That's because, many centuries ago, some Europeans were
converted to Judaism. And they dominated among the ones who came to
the Americas. Oh, yes, they commonly commonly have a trace of Israeli
origins – about as much as I have of a west Asian barbarian.

This is more
important than it seems because the concept of Zionism as a race
encourages Jews to see themselves as superior to others. Thus their
brutal treatment of Palestinians. Inevitably, the concept of race
leads to racism. And modern Israel is heavily racist.

And that puts it
quite out of step with the religion of Judaism. I can certainly
understand the desire of European Jews of the 1940s and later for a
homeland. But it was bad for us, and bad for Judaism, to take the
land of other peoples (who included Sephardic Jews) and hand it over
to others as Israel. It would have been far better, for us and for
them, to welcome them to Canada.

My that's a long
lead-in to a group called True Torah. These are Israeli Jews who are
very, very orthodox Jews. They would agree with what I have said
above. They're included here in a site from PBS.

Last night, I
watched Donald Trump on TV. It was scary. I really couldn't tell
whether he was lying, was hopelessly ignorant of American and world
issues, or was insane. But it was one of those.

I don't think he'll
win the presidency. But it scares the hell out of me that so many
Americans approve of him. And it scares the hell out of me that most
of the other Republican candidates and Hillary have values and ideas
that are not really very different.

The U.S. is a
country facing very serious economic problems, dominated by big
money, in a very advanced state of racism with all the threat that
poses to social order, a country in which the very rich are
systematically robbing everybody else (much like Canada), in which
every person has been taught a fairy tale of what their history is
and what kind of people they are, and in which citizens have more
guns than any other country in the world – guns that include
machine guns, anti-tank guns, and (quite seriously) artillery.

It also has deep and
dangerous social problems including severe poverty combined with lack
of help, a crumbling public education system, perhaps the world's
highest level of murders, mass murders, police murders, general
crime, the biggest prison system in the world (and a very bad
one)….it goes on.

And of all the
leadership candidates, only one (Democrat Bernie Sanders) has noticed
these problems exist.

I wrote a long time ago that the American empire is in danger of
collapse. And I fear the collapse may come even earlier than I had
expected.

Then there's a story
about the Keystone XL project, the one to send Canadian oil by
pipeline through the U.S. Obama, as you will remember, refused to
allow it. (I don't know whether the Irving press will have it. It's
now 3:10 pm. And I'm still waiting for my breakfast paper.) The
American government is getting sued for that by Canadian big oil.
For $15 billion.

But that's not the
important part of the story. The important part is that Canadian big
oil is……

….USING THE TERMS
OF THE NAFTA FREE TRADE DEAL TO SUPPORT ITS CASE.

Of course. Free
trade deals have been a way for major corporations to close down
factories in their homelands, the re-open them in really cheap salary
countries. That's been obvious. But they are also designed to kill
the power of governments to protect their own people. To put it
another way, they are designed to take away the power of all of us to
protect our own people and ourselves against irresponsible business
practices.

That should have
been clear when Mulroney put this deal forward. Mulroney spent his
whole life kissing up to the very rich. That's why he now lives in a
huge mansion in Montreal. Oh, he did get caught for accepting bribe
of a suitcase full of money while he was prime minister. But Stephen
Harper was gentle. He accepted Mulroney's apology for using 'bad
judgement'. And no more was said about it. After all, if you can't
accept a bribe, what's the point of being in politics?

Obama turned down the pipeline because he thought it too dangerous
for the nation that had elected him president. Most of the American
people seem to have felt the same way. But NAFTA makes it possible to
punish Americans for wanting to control their own country. $15
billion.

The only parts worth
reading are the commentaries by Alec Bruce and Justin Ryan – as
well as Aurelie Pare's health column on C6. The editorial continues
with its usual fretting about how to make a buck for some business,
while ignoring what the people of this province need.

World news is both
limited and trivial. There's a story about North Korea's claim to
have an H bomb, but it doesn't really say anything – except that
Canada can't do anything. (Ever notice that when our side has a bomb
like that, it's a 'deterrent'? But when the other side has one, it's
a 'threat'.)

Skip the story, and just read the last sentence. “Activists
suggested a very specific role for Canada: lobby hard to push NATO to
give up its own reliance on nuclear weapons as a strategic
deterrent.”

It doesn't (not even
on the sports page) have the story that Kingston, Ontario and
Windsor, Nova Scotia are fighting over which is the birthplace of
hockey.

Forget it.

Hockey was being
played before there was even a Canada. In Britain, it was a popular
game called 'shinty'. When I was a kid, we still called a pick-up
game shinty or shinny. There are 18th century paintings of
Dutch children skating and with sticks on the canals. The name
hockey, incidentally, comes from the French hoquet. And some form of
the game probably goes all the way back to a caveman walking on a
frozen creek, picking up fallen limb and wacking a small rock with
it.

The modern game,
with standard rules, the one which has a continuous history as an
organized sport, was first played in Montreal in 1875. It was, like
almost all organized sport of the time, to be played only by
gentlemen (rich people who didn't take money for playing.) Lord
Stanley saw an early game in Montreal. That's why his Stanley Cup was
dedicated to amateurs only.

Canadians are the best hockey players in the world. Most of the
Swedes in the World Cup were actually Canadians.

New Brunswickers
might be interested in an article that Paul Bennett of coalition of
rural schools/la coalition des ecoles rurales sends on. It might
come as a spark to light up the New Brunswick confusion. There is
hope.

It might also be
useful to read this opinion about the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, our
very good friends, and the ones we are selling $15 billion of
armoured cars to. And the author, Robert Fisk, is among the greatest
of journalists.

(By the way, I could
use guidance here from a weapons expert. As I understand it, armoured
cars are rarely much use on a battlefield. Their guns are feeble;
their armour is thin; and they are poor at going crosscountry. What
they are good at is attacking civilians on the paved roads of a city.
If so, is it possible the king is worried about uprisings in his
kingdom?)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Follow by Email

Loaded Web

About Me

born into poverty in Montreal. (1933 was a bad year to be born.) Kicked out of school in grade 11. Became factory hand, office boy.
Did a general BA, mostly at night at Sir George Williams University, and partly while a youth worker for YMCA, camps, etc. Then teacher training at McGill.
Taught gradea 7 to 11 for six years. Loved it.
Quit to do MA at Acadia, then PhD (History) at Queen's.
Taught history three years at UPEI, then some 35 years at Concordia U in Montreal.
Loved the teaching. Thought the profs had more pompous and useless asses among then than is really desirable outside a zoo.
work experience:
factory, office,social group work, office,camp director, teacher.
Radio - c. 3000 broadcasts, mostly current events.
TV - many hundred appearances, mostly commentaries.
Film - some writing, advising, voice-overs.
Writing - no count, some hundreds. Some academic, but mostly for popular market, and ranging from short stories to stories to newspaper and magazine columns to history books.
professional speaker - close to 2000.
Awards for the above? yep